The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (15 page)

“Right, yeah. Roy
Freeny.”

“You know him,
right?”

“Right.”

“He been around
lately?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah? Not today? He
wasn’t in today?”

“No.”

“I thought I saw him
around. I thought I saw him around here before.”

Shelly gave me a gaze-on
stare. “You’re a very inquisitive person.”

“Just being
careful.”

“Why’re you asking
questions about a customer?”

“Is that off
limits?”

“When it comes to customer
confidentiality, yeah.”

“But you
know
him, right?
You
know
Roy
Freeny. I just want to make sure.”

“What’s to know? He’s just
an ordinary guy. About as engrossing as anybody else. Nothing
exciting about him. Probably goes home and watches his phone
charge. There’s nothing to know.”

“There you’re wrong. He’s
got a very interesting background.”

“Yeah well that’s
interesting, but all I do is sell computers. All models, all the
name brands.”

“You know about his
brother? Kid killed himself?”

“I sell storage drives,
memory upgrades, presentation projectors.”

“You know about him and
Wooly Cornell?”

“I offer a full range of
product—digital cameras, music players, any named thing you
want.”

The bell in the front
sounded. Shelly glanced at the door, then immediately looked down
at the counter.

“So what kind of GPS
transmitter you looking for?” he said in a loud, Altoids-rich
voice.

A moment of total silence.
It was like a vacuum jar had dropped over the store.

I turned. A guy with a
hoodie was standing at the open door. He had the hood up, odd
considering the day’s heat. His face was shadowed, but I could see
the outlines of a bare skull, and I could see enough of his
features to match the man I’d watched in the conference room at the
village hall.

Roy stood there, taking
the situation in, absorbing it for 0.4 seconds, then bolted the
hell out.

I’m not saying Roy wasn’t
fast. He probably had some decent speed. Thing is, he had to turn
around to run. I didn’t. I had the momentum. By the time I got out
of the store, he was only 12 feet ahead of me and already losing
ground. Shoppers scuttled out of the way as our feet slapped hot
pavement.

Roy got desperate, made a
sudden jerk out into the street. But traffic was heavy and a
speeding Nissan Sentra forced him to hold up. I ran at him full on
and caught him on the side with all my weight, body slamming him
over the hood of a parked car.

He came up thrashing. His
arms were flailing so madly he knocked his own hood off and exposed
that tattooed skull. He was trying to regain his footing and ward
me off with all that whirlwind motion. Not a good defense. I hit
him in the face so hard his cheek was already turning dark with
blood rush when he staggered back on the sidewalk.

I stepped into him. This
time he lurched at me with a bent-low charge, arms clawing for
mine, trying to tackle me. I body checked him and clocked him with
an uppercut that brought strings of snotty blood streaming out of
his nose. He fell back against the window of a barbecue joint and
made a slow slide to a sitting position on the ground.

He seemed fully cooked. I
called Nickie. “I’ve got him.”

Where are you?

“By The Keypad, about a
block away.” I looked at street signs. “The corner of—“

Roy’s foot caught me
square in the chest. It had roughly the same effect, I would guess,
of being hit by a sledge hammer. Next thing I knew I was flat on
the sidewalk, looking up at the sky and trying hard to
breathe.

What happened next—people
always say things like this happen in slow motion, but that’s only
in memory. When shit like this happens, it happens fast. I saw Roy
back off and reach inside his hoodie. I rolled over and started to
get to my feet. A second later it felt like a tiny little jet was
flying just over my head. I heard a noise and felt an incredibly
miniaturized aircraft making a pass through the air space around my
head. Then another one followed the same route. I looked at Roy and
all of a sudden the fucker’s standing there with a gun in his
hand.

The next shot ricocheted
off a parking sign right behind me. The thin metal was still
twanging when I left the sidewalk and dove in front of a parked
car, ducking down just as the car’s back window ripped apart in a
sunburst pattern.

The street went
hysterical. People were scattering like Tupperware in a hurricane
while Roy kept firing. A store window on the other side of the road
suddenly exploded, its alarm going off as a million bits of glass
rained on the pavement.

Roy broke off for a
moment. I pulled the Glock and pointed it over the fender. No way
was I going to squeeze rounds with all these people around, but he
didn’t know that. He jumped behind another parked car, then shifted
over to the street side and began firing at me like he was in some
fever delirium. He was thumping bullets into the body of the car
and tearing up pieces of cement from the road and just about
shattering the molecular structure of the air over my head. I
crouched down so low I was tasting pavement.

Traffic stopped for a red
light and horns began to honk. No more shots now, just horns and
the store alarm. I looked up. Roy was sprinting between hoods and
trunk, his gun still out. Yeah, he had some speed. He was already a
block away and nearing the other side of the street. He was getting
away. And people were honking at him as he ran past. Blowing your
horn at a maniac with a gun—that’s balls.

>>>>>>

I saw him take a corner.
Seconds later, time I got there, he was gone. But Nickie was
running down the street from the opposite direction, Wooly jogging
far behind. Nickie turned down an alley in the middle of the
block.

It was a long alley,
fenced off at the end. When I got there Roy was trying to climb the
chain links, but he was having trouble. His shoes were too big to
get a foothold in the diagonal squares. Sometimes size matters
against you.

He slipped off once and
was pulling himself up for another go at it when Nickie ran up to
him and rammed the butt of her Smith & Wesson in the small of
his back. He screamed, lost his hold and down he went, his gun
clattering to the ground.

“Put your hands on the
fence!” Nickie yelled at the hunched over man. “Hands on the
fence!”

Roy grabbed the chain
links with his left hand and started hoisting himself to his feet.
Halfway up he whirled around and swung his other arm at Nickie. The
hunting knife sliced across the surface of her thigh.

I was on them by then. I
pointed the Glock at his face. “Put it down, Roy!”

He never got the chance.
Nickie smashed him in the head with her gun. Hit him once, twice.
Even after the knife fell she pistol whipped him two more
times.

I pulled her off.
“Enough!”

Roy had his hands over his
bloody head, trying to protect himself.

“Enough!”

“It’s okay,” said Nickie.
“I’ve got him. I’ve got him.”

Sirens were filling the
streets behind us.

Wooly was standing 20 feet
away. He looked totally glazed.

I walked over. “Don’t
worry, everything’s all right.”

“Look at his head,” he
said. “Look at his fucking head.”

Roy was on his knees,
crying for help, and the blood was rushing down his scalp,
funneling into his mouth, running over the tattoo of the globe on
the side of his skull.

“The world will
bleed
,” Wooly said with sick confirmation.
“
The world will stream red. Blood will run
across the earth
.”

I felt dizzy, caught in a
spell.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s
just—“

“It’s no coincidence.
Nothing like that. There’s no such thing as coincidence. I’m
standing here, I’m watching myself die. You’re listening to me,
you’re listening to the words of a dying man.”

What was weird was that he
was so calm about it. His voice was hoarse but his tone was dull,
almost bored. It was strange because Wooly was never one to pass up
the chance for a big emotion.

“It’s just closer now,
that’s all,” he said. “It’s just 48
hours
away.”

>>>>>>

A crowd had gathered at the
street end of the alley, nobody moving, like they were suspended in
the air and their feet weren’t touching the ground. Roy was still
lumped by the fence, Alex Tarkashian crouched in front of him. His
head still drizzling blood, Roy stared at Alex with a gone-lost
brood, and when he opened his mouth to talk the spaces between his
teeth were all lined with red.

We stood apart from them,
Nickie leaning against a wall, her pant leg soaked with blood.
Ambulances were coming for both her and Roy.

“This sucks,” she said. “A
fucking hunting knife. This big time sucks.”

She was staying completely
still, less out of pain I think than conservation. It was as if she
thought her anger would suddenly evaporate if she made any move at
all.

Alex got up and walked
over to us. “They’ll have to invent more letters in the alphabet to
describe this shit.”

“What’s he saying?” said
Wooly.

“He was out for you. He
admits it. Three times he shot at you. He’s copping to all
that.”

“Three
times.”

“There you go. He says he
knows nothing about the Grand Cherokee yesterday. Says he knows
even less about any attack.”

“Right, he was off saying
a novena at the time.”

“Be serious.”

Alex’s two cops lifted Roy
up and began dragging him out of the alley. One of the cops tripped
over his own feet but maintained his balance.

“A great town you’ve got
going here,” said Wooly, “killers running loose through the
streets.”

Roy, shuffling past us,
took offense. “You’re calling
me
a killer?
Me?
What about
you?
They can’t even
compute
your death toll.”

“I’m sorry about your
brother.”

“Not just my brother.
It’s
everybody
.
It’s
all
the
people you’ve killed with that fucking factory. You’re the
lead paint
of the human
race.”

The cops tried to move him
along but Roy resisted, digging his feet in, blood drooling from
his head and pooling on the ground.

“You’re still at it?” said
Wooly. “You’re still pumping all that willy nilly shit?”

Roy made his case to Alex.
“Nobody
listens
.
Nobody
understands
about him. Nobody sees the
madness
of it all, and you know
something? It just
gets
to you after a while.”

“I know,” said Alex. “Life
would be easier without him, but you’ve got to learn to control
yourself.”

“He
stinks
. He
deserves
reprisals. He should take
a
restraining
order out on himself.”

Alex stepped closer to
him. “I’ve known you a long time, Roy. I knew your mother. I’ll
treat you with all fairness, I’ll read you your rights myself, but
don’t fuck with me. Now move.”

But Roy wasn’t done. He
looked at Nickie. “And what about
her?
She’s
not a killer?”

Nickie turned away from
him. “Shit,” she said softly.

“Lot of people still think
what she did was murder.”

“All right,” said Alex,
”enough with this shit. Move.”

He and the other cops
started shoving Roy toward the street.

“I keep thinking,” said
Roy, “I’ll go to the doctor one day with some strange disease, and
he’ll say have you ever been exposed to Nickie
Castillo?”

“He has no
right
,” Nickie yelled,
“to talk like that.”

Alex turned to her. “What
do you
expect
him
to say?”

They pushed Roy out of the
alley. Nickie limped after them, silent, sullen.

I looked at Wooly.
“What’re they talking about?”

“Fuck if I
know.”

>>>>>>

TUESDAY JUNE 19, 1:00
p.m.

A MAZE OF
SECRETS

We followed the ambulances
to Hidden Lake Hospital. Wooly said he had no idea about
nothing—not Nickie, not the Grand Cherokee. He didn’t know, he
couldn’t think. He couldn’t get past what he called that fucktuous
prediction, the blood streaming over the tattoo of the
earth.